Saturday, April 18, 2009

To Tweet or not to Tweet

I belong to a local chapter of Romance Writers of America based in Des Moines, Iowa. We're called the Iowa Romance Novelists. Yesterday, our guest speaker was Cheryl Corbin who introduced us to Twitter and how authors can make it work for them. She was fab!

I've been avoiding Twitter because I was worried it would be a real time sink, but I think after listening to Cheryl's talk, I'll give it a try. Let me see if I can remember the high points...

Don't follow everyone, develop relationships. In other words, just follow a few people at a time and respond to their posts. Don't just make them your friend...make friends with them.

Be professional. Remember that you're trying to get people interested in your books. Rants won't get you anywhere - assuming you can rant in just 140 characters.

Quality not quantity. You don't have to tweet every little thing you do. People do not want to know you blew your nose today - they want something interesting. They want to be entertained.

Write about writing. If this is your author account, then write about writing. What your process is like. What you're working on - but no spoilers. Write teasers. This was a cool point, because I'd never really considered doing this before. On Facebook I talk about finishing a chapter and stuff, but I'd not considered writing a one line teaser about a chapter in progress, etc. Cool concept.

These are just some of the basics. This was a very neat class and Cheryl was an excellent teacher. So consider jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and get tweeting. Follow me at http://twitter.com/francescahawley .

Brenda and Lori, It's kind of cool. Cheryl also introduced us to a complementary app called TweetDeck which helps you manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts. I really like that for figuring out what's going on.

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